Property Taxes and Quality of Life

There is no question whatsoever that the hottest topic in the state legislature right now is property tax "reform". What I want to know is who up there is taking a serious look at how these so called reforms are going to affect the quality of life here in Florida? What do I mean by this? Come along and we'll take a quick tour of the issues.

Nobody disputes that there are serious inequities in our current property tax system. However, nothing in the House bill actually addresses those inequities, and precious little in the Senate bill. Here are the subgroups of people who have been most seriously disadvantaged by our current property tax system:

1) Rental property owners and by extension renters.
2) Business property owners
3) Non homestead residential property owners
4) Homesteaders trapped in their homes by Save Our Homes

Rental property owners, particularly those who rent affordable units, have been brutally hit by the current property tax system. But the people they have been hit by are the property appraisers. The appraisers see that property as a potential high price condo and tax it accordingly. That's akin to an income tax that taxes you on what you might have earned rather than what you actually earned. What a brilliant idea that is.

Business property owners have the same problem. Their properties are being taxed as if they were in a new multi use property or a new office tower, as opposed to the mom and pop shop they actually run. More taxes on potential.

Non homestead residential property owners, or second home owners if you will are also getting hammered by the run up in real estate values. But legislators, here's a clue. These people are either not citizens of Florida, or they are fortunate enough to own a second home in this state. The first group are not voters here. The second group, to the extent they can afford to have a second home in this state also ought to be able to afford the taxes on it.

Finally we have the homesteaders who are trapped in their current homes by the Save Our Homes amendment and its unintended consequences. The Save Our Homes amendment is working exactly as it was meant to. People are not being taxed out of their homesteads in Florida. But they are being held hostage in their current homes due to the tax consequences of moving into a new home.

So what do the House and Senate "reform" plans do for these classes of tax payers? The house bill does virtually nothing for anyone except homestead property owners, the exact class that needs tax relief the least. I was fortunate enough to buy a property in downtown St. Petersburg 10 years ago. Thanks to Save Our Homes and Homestead Exemption, the taxable value of my home is still below my 10 year old purchase price. Meanwhile the actual market value of my home has quadrupled. Do I need tax relief? Actually my city taxes in St. Petersburg declined slightly last year. The only tax reform I need is Save Our Homes portability.

The Senate bill attempts a form of temporary portability. Their excuse is that there are constitutional issues (US Constitution) against just making Save Our Homes fully portable. The issue is that making Save Our Homes portable would unconstitutionally create different classes of taxpayers in Florida. This argument is spurious at best. We have had Homestead Exemption for as long as I can remember. We have additional homestead exemptions available for the elderly, disabled veterans, widows and probably some other groups. None of these has ever been successfully challenged on constitutional grounds. There is no real reason to suspect that Save Our Homes portability would not pass the same test.

How about rental property owners and the renters themselves? Well, if your rental property is qualified as "affordable" and you agree to maintain that use of the property for 20 years, you can get your appraised value figured on actual cash flow on the property. There is no reason that actual cash flow could not be used as a valuation method on all rental properties.

The same thing applies to other business property owners. They need to get off "highest and best use" appraisals and get onto some variation of current use valuation. Nothing substantial is being proposed for these property owners.

Now, what has all this to do with quality of life. The reforms that I am in favor of above are already going to cost local governments tax revenue. The bigger gun to the head of local governments is actually the various proposals to "roll back" local governments property tax revenue to some prior year. That is what is going to hit us all squarely in our quality of life.

My own local governments, St. Petersburg and Pinellas County have not been profligate squanderers of tax money, but they are being dumped into the same boat with other local governments that might have been. Both governments have been looking at the likely consequences of the property tax proposals in Tallahassee. Both local governments have insisted that the police and sheriff's departments would not have services curtailed due to property tax revenue reductions. So where does that leave them?

St. Petersburg has mentioned that some fire stations might be closed. That can not have a good effect on overall fire department response times.

St. Petersburg and Pinellas County are faced with a homelessness crisis, as evidenced by the tent cities that have sprung up in St. Petersburg. Residents and business owners want government to step in and fix the problem. The temporary solution is more emergency shelter beds. The longer term solution is affordable housing. Both of these "solutions" cost money. However these are precisely the spending areas that are likely to fare poorly when the budget axe falls. We will then have to deal with the current homeless situation without major relief for some time to come.

Pinellas County is starting to have second thoughts about the feasibility of Tax Increment Financing (TIF). This is the program that allows all property tax revenues from a specific area (city and county) to be reinvested in those specific areas. TIF has had spectacular results in downtown St. petersburg and in Ybor City. If county governments decide they can no longer afford TIFs, the economic effects in construction spending slowdowns will be felt for years to come.

St. Petersburg has already prepared a letter to all social service agencies and charities that have received financial support from the City. These folks have been told to plan their budgets on the basis that they would receive no funds from the City of St. Petersburg this year. These items include support for alcohol treatment centers and an inebriate receiving center.

Other quality of life areas sure to receive budget hits are the Pier Aquarium, the Florida Orchestra, the MLK Festival Band Event and various other City Co-sponsored events. Some of us are surely going to miss these things when they are gone.

There are other areas that are sure to take some hits as well. Library branches might close, or have their hours of operation sharply reduced. Parks will not have their grass cut or their other maintenance needs tended to as we would like to see them.

If our legislators rush into this so called "property tax reform" without careful consideration, we are going to be feeling the unintended consequences in our quality of life for years to come.

Who will the legislators blame then?

Would You Give Money to This Man?

There is an effort under way, quietly, to make an impact on local politics. The goal is to get reasonable people who share progressive values elected to local office. The difference here is to not leave this to chance. This efforts' mission is to identify, nurture and finance these candidates early on in the process.

The business plan, including an initial budget proposal, for this effort has been drafted. Political goals for 2007 have been drafted. Most folks who have been asked about the idea and specific plans have been supportive, in theory.

The issue for this effort, now, is how to turn this theoretical support into concrete support. Unfortunately in realpolitik today, that means money. While many people are supportive of the effort and have added their ideas and encouragement, no one has stepped up to fulfill a financial commitment.

While the effort is designed to be somewhat under the radar, there is a face in the forefront. It is a face that really doesn't seek the spotlight. This might be part of the problem. So what we are going to do here is to describe this face:

• Note: Here's a plea. If you think you know the identity of this person, keep it to yourself. Comments and suggestions are welcome, but please make them generic or issue related, not specific to the individual as much to as to the mission.
• This guy has met and had both private and public discussions with every major Dem presidential candidate for the last three cycles. His history in this area goes back before that, but the current streak goes back to 1996.
• He has travelled extensively with a former Senator and Governor during the Senators' short lived presidential bid. He feels fortunate to be considered a friend of the family. And while he loves the Senator, he thinks the Senators' wife walks on water.
• During these travels with the Senator, he met an independent film maker who happens to have a highly placed mother (currently second in line of presidential succession). Because of this relationship with the daughter, the well placed mother calls the dude by his first name (even when he is not wearing a name tag) and has, from time to time, made her staff available to assist the guy in his various political efforts.
• That brings us to what our guy considers one of his serious drawbacks. Most of his most intimate political experiences have been with unsuccessful efforts. However, he likes to think about Abraham Lincoln and Toby Ziegler. That may seem like an unlikely pairing, but consider this: Neither one had been particularly successful until they hit the big one.
• Our guy has never considered himself particularly creative. However he was informed by someone who has been spectacularly successfully creative that he has it all wrong. This dude perceived in our guy an ability to recognize and act on a good idea when he hears it. While our guy did not consider this particularly creative, his creative friend told him that that is one of the most sought after capabilities amongst advertising and other "creative types". Our guy is still not totally convinced, but he does enjoy hanging out with creative types.
• One of the dude's most cherished values is "community". Because of this, he has a burning desire to add value to the community that he loves so much. This is why he is willing to be the face of the subject effort when his preference is to remain securely in the background.

So there is a thumbnail sketch of our guy. Here are two questions for you:

• Are you supportive of the proposed effort?
• Would you let this dude control your financial contribution to this effort?

I truly am interested in receiving your feedback. Don't hold back. Let me know what you really think.

What Every So Called Political Professional Needs to Know

Do you ever hear a phrase or a saying that just sticks with you? The kind of thing that keeps popping into your head at the weirdest times? Here is the story of one that should be first and foremost in the minds of every one who considers themselves a political professional.

I was standing in this room with a bunch of disgusted Democrats. It was early in 2003. They were still pissed off about the 2000 election fiasco in Florida. And they were absolutely steaming about the governors race that was so badly handled in 2002.

It was the 2000 elections that they were using as a rallying cry. The number 537 played a prominent part in this discussion. There was no crying over the spilt milk of 2002 here. This was all about 2004, and the lessons learned in 2000 and not applied in 2002.

It was a pretty interesting group. There was a County Commissioner whose mother was to run for the US Senate and who is now, herself, a newly minted Congresswoman. There was a former County Commissioner who ran a valiant but unsuccessful Congressional campaign in 2006. The campaign manager for the incumbent Congressman was there. There were some dudes there, but none of us were as impressive as the women in the room.

The matriarch of this group was the mother of the successful attorney who had graciously offered up her home for the evening. One of the interesting things we did that night was to go around the room and offer up our reasons for being a Democrat. That's a story for another time. As we were about to wrap up for the night, the matriarch said she wanted to leave us with something to think about.

Our matriarch was, at that time, a recently retired County Commissioner. She did not stay retired for long. She is now a very successful County Clerk. She wanted to leave us with something that had stuck with her for a very long time. It was something that was told to her by someone we all knew. This fellow was a former teacher and a union leader. He became a Mayor and then a Governor. He wasn't with us that night because he had changed teams in the midst of his rise to political fame and fortune.

There were a lot of people in that room that night who had won, and lost, a lot of elections. But they all nodded when our matriarch relayed this pearl of wisdom to us:

If you have a dozen committed volunteers, you can win any election.

Now those of you who have worked on large campaigns are probably shaking your head at the perceived naivete of that statement. But think about it for a second. This wasn't a statement from some dude who just got elected dog catcher. He had been elected and re-elected as a union leader. He was the mayor of a major city. He was the governor of a significant state. If you still don't get it, maybe you should take up another profession.

At the end of the day, in a close election, what is going to make the difference? In my mind it is the ability to get more of your voters to the polls than the other guy does. In the 2000 presidential election in Florida, 538 more Democratic voters would have changed the history of the world. That's less than 10 votes in each county in Florida. Or for your dozen volunteers, less than 45 successful calls per person.

But the real power of the dozen volunteers is not just the work they do directly. It is the dozen volunteers recruited by each of them, and the dozen volunteers recruited by each of those volunteers. It is the fact that these dozen volunteers believe in you that sustains you. So let's not let these dozen volunteers down again.

Let's not ever lose another election because we did not put enough resources into our ground game. Remember what a difference 538 votes would have made in 2000. For all the mistakes of the Kerry campaign in 2004, they got that lesson, sorta. They got more Democratic votes to the polls than any other candidate in history. Their problem there was that the other guy did better than they did. Who'd a thunk it?

The 2006 election cycle was one that saw many wonderful victories for our team. But I keep thinking about the one we let get away. We faced a daunting challenge. Our opponent would raise and have spent more money on his behalf than in any other campaign in the country that cycle. He had run several statewide races before. This was our guy's first try at statewide office. And we were not going to get close in the money raising department.

Still for all that, we were closing at the end. We could have won this one. So why didn't we? We did not get more of our voters to the polls than the other guy did. At the end of the day that is the only story that matters. Our team made a conscious decision to put as much of the money as they possibly could into television. It's a huge state after all. You can't win statewide in Florida playing retail politics they said.

Well, they were wrong. You can do it. One of our greatest campaigners walked throughout the entire state. Another went out and spent days working ordinary jobs with ordinary people. That's retail politics folks. And ground is cheap. Ridiculously cheap. But that is where you leverage those 12 committed volunteers. You pay your organizers to look after their care and feeding and to give them some direction. Then you get out of the way and let them do their thing.

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement. Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant.